Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2018/04/on-hans-asperger-...
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
This is one area of the Nazi horror that I wasn't very well acquainted with. Makes me sick to think about.
I have my own slant, so sure, i am agreeing with points that articulate my own feelings better than I have. But even if you disagree there has to be some mechanism for elevating a dialogue, and i think that's one.
In my own personal experience, people who had or fit the diagnostic model were socially isolated, basically unfulfilled and uncomfortable in some way, and i could see that by the way they engaged verbally and i was happy to engage back wherever i could. Sure; i don't actually want to talk about star wars novels or what snack foods someone ate 20 years ago at summer camp for two hours. But sometimes if you are socially isolated too, it can feel good just to know you gave someone else the chance to open up and be animated. That requires an investment though, and i can understand how tired a "normal" person would get of doing that essentially as charity.
But you guys sure could have been more charitable in the discussion here, and not so deeply polarized. My experience with mental health issues is that they polarize people kind of abusively. You guys are generally the smartest and most mature place i can go to lurk a discussion. I'm sad to see that personal stake being used against that comity and intellectual atmosphere.
Multiple times I have gotten shocked reactions when they discover after several conversations that I have never played World of Warcraft, or watched Doctor Who, because we have been talking about it for so long. This is usually because the more isolated someone is the less questions they ask and they more 1-way the conversation is, but it can result in hurt feelings if they feel mislead. So now I am sure to position myself early as interested but not experienced for whatever made up reason.
This not only helps them connect with someone, but has given me the most fascinating insights into the thought process, inner lives, and domain expertise of people very different from me. But I also wonder if this intense listening, but not participating psychological voyeurism is part of my own personality disorder... and preventing me from fully engaging with the world.
I took this strange passion so far that I attempted to make a startup where semi-famous people read Audio Books from OTHER authors, and then paused in between chapters to give you their reflections on what they had just read.
When I was six years old, I found in an old 'news annual' book a terrible photo from one of the concentration camps. I was upset for days. To this day, I struggle to understand how such intense psychopaths come into power.
Yes, it's probably better than Nazi Poland. It's still a moral disaster.
Note that while it is true that some kids have committed a crime, there's 2 big remarks to be made there:
1) only <10% have been accused of a crime at all, 90% is there "for their own protection". Doesn't save them from the isolation cells.
2) even for those 10%, they have only been accused. Youth laws do not require any kind of proof. Nor is there defense.
3) The same goes for the 90%, all there is to say the home situation is not safe is the word of one youth worker. This youth worker has never seen the child before the trial, they have only received a single document from another youth worker who is supposed to have seen the child (but often hasn't, in fact that they fail to see those children is often a reason for passing the case to the justice system in the first place: "lack of cooperation")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFaNx1Y-fY
(if you set the captions on and to English you should be able to understand)
Any heavy-right-wing and/or ultra-nationalistic or xenophobic ideology is at its core anti-individualistic anti-"people who develop their minds along their own tracks separate from society".
There is a huge difference between people who are less-integrated / less-affective / less-social / Gemüt-poor, and people with hateful, resentful and genocidal-friendly attitudes. "Gemüt-rich people" simply have a higher inertia by being anchored to their societies so they may seem "better" because it's harder to make them do horrible things when they are in a healthy society. But as in physics, inertia works both ways, "Gemüt-rich" or more conformist people will keep doing horrible things (and competing + cooperating to be more horrible) once they start doing them!
"Badly socially integrated", asocial, highly-functional-autism or "Gemüt-poor" individuals can also function as a society's immune system that helps it fight back and recover from malignant ideologies like nazism and extremist-communism!
Socialism seems very popular and it's also pretty controlled.
Any totalitarian ideology is at its core anti-individualistic. Individualism is about the freedom to opt out, to say, 'no thanks, I'd like to do things my own way.'
This is both a useless platitude and deeply offensive to state... we may be the product of an environment, but we also produce/reshape the environment on our turn, that's the important part of the loop, and the part we can act upon!
Focusing on the other is both counter-productive and depression-inducing. We're humans because we create / build / forge / destroy / reshape our environment, otherwise we could just as well imagine we're vegetables growing in a "social garden" fed by "societal night soil fertilizer" - such an attitude can only promote apathy and justify not taking responsibility for things!
All people have innate characteristics/talents/deficiencies etc., we're not blank slates programmed by "the social environment", it's about understanding how to work with what we get from the gene + "random chaos of the natural environment" lottery...
I've raised two special needs sons. They are late twenties/early thirties. This is a problem space I've thought a lot about. My thoughts on the subject seem to generally not plug into the current public narrative.
I'm still trying to figure out how to write effectively about it so it's clear to other people.
Just don't ever starts with "people are products of their social environments", it can send the totally wrong vibe to many people and make cause the rest of the message be misunderstood. At least reword it somehow. Lots of people are "violently allergic" to this kind of social-determinism style discourse.
But I will try to be clearer in the future.
Thanks.
It's also called "contrarianism." Contrarianism, engagement, and Free Speech were celebrated when the Left-dominated media was still fighting for dominance, whereas the Right pooh-poohed it. Now, contrarianism, engagement, and Free Speech are the province of the Right.
Badly socially integrated "Gemüt-poor" individuals gravitate towards the side that has to resort to rationality and sense. This often causes them to speak truth to power, when others would make the social calculation and keep mum.
I think the pendulum is related to the Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths progression.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
The side with the rising/peaking social currency/power attracts the mops, then the sociopaths. Many geeks then wind up on the side furthest away from the sociopaths, causing a flip-flop or another swing of the pendulum. (There will always be a concentration of sociopaths on the extreme ends of the political spectrum, as that is the best tactical ground for outrage virality tactics.)
One of the main difficulties for me is determining closeness of relationships. Like a distance metric; close relatives being closer than friends which are closer than acquaintances which in turn are closer than unknowns and enemies are very far away. I have never been able to understand how that distance metric works and therefore been unable to distinguish between friends and foes. Autism is not an evolutionary adaptation. It could be a remnant from the Neanderthal genome, as some scientists suggests, as that species were less group-oriented than Homo Sapiens.
If someone intends to hurt you, where would you put that person on the friend or foe spectrum?
If someone intends to help you, where would you put that person on the friend or foe spectrum?
If someone likes you and you like them, where would you put that person on the friend or foe spectrum?
If you don't like someone and they don't like you, where would you put that person on the friend or foe spectrum?
How about for a person who doesn't like you and you don't like them and they intend to hurt you?
Those are the kinds of questions the answers to which would help me to determine whether someone is a friend or foe.
How do you know that someone intends to hurt you?
How do you know that someone intends to help you?
How do you know that someone likes you?
How do you know that someone doesn't like you?
Unless you can accurately answer those questions, you'll never know the closeness of your relationships.
I'd tentatively suggest "Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (LRB review)" but I'm sure others could come up with better suggestions.
Thanks!
(To be clear: I'm sure there was zero malice behind this title, it's just an unfortunate display issue.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-6-americans-t...
As there is no endpoint in medicine, future generations will view our hero doctors in the same way.
OK, I have aspergers and I have kids with aspergers, all professionally diagnosed. And I have read the history of Dr Asperger multiple times already, it really is not that hard to find. So with that I try to read this article...and I can't. I reads too much like gossip magazine.
The entire purpose, whether the author wants to admit it or not, is to create a negative association between Asperger's syndrome and Dr. Asperger. So now, if you find out someone has Aspergers your thought process will start with "oh, that is horrible". This creates a new wave of idiots who start conversations with "Did you know Dr Asperger was a bad man?"...Yes, and he is dead now, so how is that relevant to anything?
So, if you like reading gossip, I'm sure this is a fun read for you. But there it contains nothing of value.
Notice also how Leo Kanner only published about autism in 1943, writing about just one child. Wonder why? The two doctors Hamburger and Asperger replaced, Frankl and Weiss, went to the US to work with Kanner. Yet none of them wrote about specific children until 1943, after the US was in the war, after the US turned about face about eugenics,, and after Kanner could do due dilligence to make sure that he could write about the Donald T case and not endanger the child.
You, as your comment indicated, have left a paper trail about having Asperger's. I'm an MIT alum, and know quite a few people who could be diagnosed without raising any eyebrows. But already "autism" is a term of abuse in the chan crowds, and Asperger's history is worth keeping in mind in that regard.
Also noteworthy, "autism" is the boogeyman of the antivax movement.
No, that's not the point at all. The point is to question the validity of the concept.
It's apparently the Nazi version of so much race based BS in the US. The US has a long history of saying people of color are less intelligent, unfit to lead, are happier as servants and so forth. It justifies condemning them to a permanent underclass.
If autism is really what the Nazi regime chose to call people it found inadequately emotionally manipulable for its purposes, then you have to question the validity of the label at all.
Then you have to wonder if maybe they are just people and maybe people come in a wide variety of flavors and maybe the flavor we call "autism" isn't some inherent defect after all.
I used to spend a lot of time on parenting lists and even was a low level presenter at a gifted conference when I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I have two special needs sons who likely qualify for a label somewhere on the autism spectrum, though neither has a formal diagnosis.
I just gave them a lot of instruction on why people do the things they do and how social stuff works while respecting the fact that my sons didn't innately want to interact with others in the "standard" manner. I get along well with them.
I think it is fundamentally problematic to label people as defective simply for being different. Their father likely also qualifies for a diagnosis somewhere on the autism spectrum. As far as I know, he has never sought a diagnosis.
He joined the army when he was twenty and we had an old fashioned marriage.
In the army, everyone where's a uniform. This fits well with the current standard recommendation to let ASD people get multiple copies of their favorite items and dress the same everyday. Wearing a uniform for the job is something most people complain about. For him, it worked well. Bonus points: He wasn't "weird" or "defective" for dressing the same everyday. He was just doing what was required of him by the job.
Military uniforms have the person's last name on the front above the pocket. The fact that he had trouble recognizing faces was not important. All his coworkers had labels.
He was very good at his job, but I handled a lot of the traditional duties typically handled by a full-time wife. This is part of why he excelled at his job. It was the only thing he really needed to focus on.
Over the years, I've seen some research indicating that men with full-time wives typically rise through the ranks at work faster. I've discussed such with other college educated women and so forth.
In the lifetime of my children, the world stopped being predominantly agrarian and became predominantly urban. Most people now live in cities and this has been true for less than thirty years.
In short, the world has changed tremendously. Yet, rather than positing that the world we created is ill-suited to the needs of many humans, we posit that folks who don't readily fit into this never-before-seen highly technologically advanced society were simply born broken. We posit that there is suddenly a shockingly high percentage of defective humans.
I have to question that framing. It doesn't fit with my understanding at all of life, the universe and everything.
It isn't meant to threaten your coping mechanisms.
Personally, I was struck when I saw how kids in my son's kindergarten were bucketed on the angel->troublemaker spectrum. It's a very one-dimensional approach.
At the end of the day, people usually find their role where they click. A top-tier salesperson or engineer have very different personalities and traits that make them effective, but aren't inherently better or worse than each other.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Historical material isn't gossip, and is welcome on HN.
By talking about what he did, and why he did it within the context of his culture, it laid bare to me just how much our culture influences our behavior and personality.
I don't think it's necessary to conclude what an article may mean for another person. The article definitely had value for me.